Now that they own the SoC design pipeline, they’re really able to flex these muscles.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45130802

Points: 11

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39046596

Points: 2

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https://freakonomics.com/podcast/when-did-marriage-become-a-...

My biggest regret is the database. During gameplay, the database needs to be in memory so the game loop has as little latency as possible, so the database is just for persistence when the app closes. I really should use something built for this purpose, like sqlite. But the database engine I'm using is designed to be transparent and convenient. It uses a JavaScript proxy to track any time a data mutation is made to the in-memory database, and dumps that to the JSON file on a throttle.

Everything else is meeting my needs just fine.

The hope is that the game can be hosted over the internet through port-forwarding or on a VPC. That "part of a larger event" is actually in reference to running the game over a LAN at a convention.

The USS Voyager is a physical bridge simulator in Utah, USA that uses the Thorium Classic software, the precursor to Thorium Nova.

Fortunately, the scope of this is significantly less than Star Citizen, since all of the first-person content of the game is supposed to happen in real-life, LARP-style.

We once did an away mission where the crew was stranded on a remote planet and running out of water. We split the crew, where one half we going to find a viable water source and the other needed to track down a local scientist who had the parts we needed to repair the ship.

After dressing them up in our weirdest costumes, we trekked them outside. The water group were sent to a local convenience store with a couple of dollar bills and told to "act natural" as they picked up some bottled water. I was happy to find that they absolutely did not act normal.

The other group went to a local staff member's house, which had been decorated to look like the scientists laboratory.

Needless to say, the whole experience was quite memorable, and highlights how the computer controls are only part of what makes the simulation fun.

So if you have fewer players, you can play on a smaller ship that doesn't have any non-player crew members. Or, conversely, a large group will have additional stations to spread the work out a little bit.

Hopefully everything feels meaningful and impactful at every crew and ship size and nothing feels like busywork.

If you want to help guide what's included and how they fit together, I'm happy to entertain proposals in the Github discussions or Discord.

I should add that Thorium Nova will include a lot more inter-ship controls. Things like security officers, system maintenance, medical teams, cargo transfer, power grid distribution - that kind of thing. Adding all of that will effectively double the max-crew size of the typical 6 you see in other bridge sims.

DMX and other show-control features will come much later, after the main gameplay features are completed. But they're my favorite part, so I'll definitely get to them eventually.